Hypothesis tests for hydrologic alteration

- Shifts in flow duration curves can be used to test for significant hydrologic alteration.
- A hypothesis test based flow duration curve confidence intervals performed best.
- The best experiment was a jackknife resampling of the mean flow duration curve.

SummaryHydrologic systems can be altered by anthropogenic and climatic influences. While there are a number of statistical frameworks for describing and evaluating the extent of hydrologic alteration, here we present a new framework for assessing whether statistically significant hydrologic alteration has occurred, or whether the shift in the hydrologic regime is consistent with the natural variability of the system. Four hypothesis tests based on shifts of flow duration curves (FDCs) are developed and tested using three different experimental designs based on different strategies for resampling of annual FDCs. The four hypothesis tests examined are the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS), Kuiper (K), confidence interval (CI), and ecosurplus and ecodeficit (Eco). Here 117 streamflow sites that have potentially undergone hydrologic alteration due to reservoir construction are examined. 20 years of pre-reservoir record is used to develop the critical value of the test statistic for type I errors of 5% and 10%, while 10 years of post-alteration record is used to examine the power of each test. The best experimental design, based on calculating the mean annual FDC from an exhaustive jackknife resampling regime, provided a larger number of unique values of each test statistic and properly reproduced type I errors. Of the four tests, the CI test consistently had the highest power, while the K test had the second highest power; KS and Eco always had the lowest power. The power of the CI test appeared related to the storage ratio of the reservoir, a rough measure of the hydrologic alteration of the system.